Fit between humanitarian professionals and project requirements: hybrid group decision procedure to reduce uncertainty in decision-making

Choosing the right professional that has to meet indeterminate requirements is a critical aspect in humanitarian development and implementation projects. This paper proposes a hybrid evaluation methodology for some non-governmental organizations enabling them to select the most competent expert who can properly and adequately develop and implement humanitarian projects. This methodology accommodates various stakeholders’ perspectives in satisfying the unique requirements of humanitarian projects that are capable of handling a range of uncertain issues from both stakeholders and project requirements. The criteria weights are calculated using a two-step multi-criteria decision-making method: (1) Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process for the evaluation of the decision maker weights coupled with (2) Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) to rank the alternatives which provide the ability to take into account both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Sensitivity analysis have been developed and discussed by means of a real case of expert selection problem for a non-profit organisation. The results show that the approach allows a decrease in the uncertainty associated with decision-making, which proves that the approach provides robust solutions in terms of sensitivity analysis

Beyond the looking glass? ‘Aidland’ reconsidered

This paper engages with an emerging genre in anthropology’s engagement with international development – writing about ‘Aidland’ which focus attention on the lives, motivations and personalities of ‘development professionals’. It suggests that there are two possible problems with the growing popularity of work on Aidland: first, that it rests on a reified and dated view of the worlds of aid and development; second, that an ethnographic focus on development professionals may serve to divert attention to the significance of both the politics and the material effects of development intervention and the relations of power within which they are embedded